Candles for a Street Corner (Born Magazine, 2004)

This animated poetry video confronts the fear of growing older but not necessarily wiser. Flash setting by Michele D'Auria. Narration by the author. (Requires Flash)

In the Garden of Recounting (Drunken Boat, 2004)

In the Garden of Recounting lets you tend and nurture memories that grow into a story. You are presented with a garden to explore, and as you move your mouse over the vegetation, lines of text sprout from it. Throughout this process, you can also “water” the garden with commentary that drips down from an overhanging cloud when you mouse over a set of keywords. The work metaphorically represents the process of coaxing fragmentary images out of memory in order to piece together an account of the past. It also demonstrates the way that memories change organically over time and how they can mutate in order to meet the needs of the story one wants to tell about oneself. This digital garden compels you to recognize that the acts of recalling and recounting are dependent not upon a fixed body of data but upon continually growing and changing organic structures within the brain. (Requires Flash)

Faith is a kinetic poem that reveals itself in five successive states. Each new state is overlaid onto the previous one, incorporating the old text into the new. Each new state absorbs the previous one while at the same time engaging in an argument with it. The gradual textual unfolding is choreographed to music. (Requires Flash)

Clues explores the nature of communication, knowledge, and identity through the language and postures of mystery fiction. It's a metaphysical whodunit that invites you to solve the mystery by uncovering clues linked to images throughout the work. The search becomes a game that leads you down wooded trails, back alleys, and empty hallways. Which characters should you pursue? Which objects should you investigate? To win the game, you must separate all the clues from the red herrings. Your final score determines the outcome of the text. But is the mystery really soluble? Is winning actually better than losing? Are the answers or the questions more revealing?

The Seasons (Eastgate Hypertext Reading Room)

Penetration (2000) and Dispossession (1999)
Penetration explores change. The immigrant’s experience of changing homelands, the seasonal changes within those lands themselves, and evolving states of mind are counterpointed against one another and against the shifting hypertextual structure of the poetry. The poem focuses on two immigrants from Eastern Europe, a father and daughter, who are seeing each other again for the first time in many years. The natural world around them becomes a third character, the Mothering Earth. The hypertext unfolds organically from the reader’s choices, with each different reading emphasizing different aspects of the relationship. Many pages in the work contain variable text, which changes whenever the reader rereads that page. The changeability of the text reflects the constant flux of the relationships explored in the poem. Dispossession follows a man who is leaving his Caribbean homeland for America. The uncertainty of the future is represented by the changeable structure, which places recurring images in contrasting contexts.

Two Duets

A Study in Shades (Cortland Review, 2000; also available on BBC Online)
A Study in Shades explores the devastation of Alzheimer’s Disease from the points of view of a man afflicted by it and his daughter. The reader interacts with the poem to experience the different perspectives of the two characters and their relationship to each other. An interplay between text and morphing graphics reflects the progress of this relationship.

A Study in Conveyance (The New River, 2001)

Frame Work (Iowa Review Web, 1999)

In Frame Work, the interplay among texts in different frames of the browser explores the way the mind refocuses among modes of perception. The focus shifts from images inside a room to those outside a window.

A Life Set for Two

Information about the book-length hypertext poem (Eastgate Systems, 1996)

SoftPoems

Kinetic visual poetry for the PC that can be downloaded. These are among the earliest poems of this type ever written. (1990-91)

Visual Poetry

Paper Music, Ear Ink (Notre Dame Review, No. 14, 2002)

Sostenuto for Strings
Concerto for Perfection
Kinderscenen
Sonata for Unaccompanied Being
Impromptu on the Incomplete
A series of 5 visual poems based on music imagery.

Linear Poetry

Poems on the Web

A Wandering City

Excerpts from the printed collection (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1992), winner of the CSU Poetry Center Prize